Better Times Collide With Now
by DangerousGranger
Summary: Hermione's thoughts on seeing Draco's new girlfriend.  AU fic.  Probably a oneshot.


_Hermione was leaning against my brother in the gray hours of the morning outside Burn, which was one of the only places the crew had been able to find where the girls could dance. It was designed by a Slytherin and the architecture suspiciously resembled the Slytherin dungeons. They don't care if you smoke, and Draco leaned against a damp concrete wall and did so, his expression never changing. Hermione wondered why he liked Burn so much, why he bothered coming at all if he was just going to lean against the wall and watch them dance. She thought he might be bored, so she held cigarettes to his mouth for him to suck on while they danced and watch them light up his pretty, chiseled face. _

**Hermione:**

Having been taken to the greatest heights of a pure, drunken love, I woke up wondering what I was supposed to do now. It was a disappointment, as if they had killed my favorite storybook character, the one thing I could believe in even when the world got mean. It's a good idea to be alone when they've killed your favorite character, because if you start raving about it everyone will think you're a lunatic, so I left before anyone could suggest breakfast. Pansy, Draco and the girlfriend were coiled up in sleep like rattlesnakes. Bad dream, I thought, shaking it off and opening the door to the bright world.

All Pansy had talked about for the past week was Draco and his new girlfriend. She misses Draco now that he has her. She sleeps in his bed while he's gone, surrounded by his discarded Prada boxes and empty chocolate frog wrappers and books from his first year of law school. I think she wanted me to tell her it drives me nuts too and then we could have a nice bottle of wine and a good long chat about why and both cry. But there's no way in hell I'd tell her that, no way in hell I'd tell her about the beautiful story I had in my head that Draco killed in the gray hours of the morning.

I decided to keep myself good and drunk. I took the dog for a walk in the sun every three hours to sober up so that I could start fresh every four and give myself enough to keep every hour interesting and new in its own way, for that long, long weekend, the first of Draco's summer vacation. How I wound up alone in a big city with a bunch of Slytherins as my only companions is a longer and less interesting story than I ever tell.

Pansy was still wearing her dress from the night. It buttons down the back in complicated silk frogs that she couldn't undo by herself. I grinned when she threw a tantrum at the buttons and calmly swirled another piece of buttery yellowtail into a shot glass filled with soy sauce and spicy green stuff. Around five o'clock in the afternoon, more people gathered at the house. Luna, in town for a Nargle conference, brought flowers and we entertained ourselves for an hour by sticking them in our hair at odd angles. Then Pansy got a Floo call and it was him – the two of them were driving down for the evening.

The girlfriend hung back like a marionette whose strings we'd forgotten to pull, or wouldn't pull out of contempt. I flashed my love for Pansy in the air like a knife, she was the only reason I was here. Getting bolder, I stared over the rim of my drink at everything but him until he had no choice but to look at me, then my gaze free to scare his eyes back into their sockets. This was fun and I was suddenly I was deliriously happy to be in his presence again. I studied his jaw line and smiled and waited. The flowers wilted in the heat, drooping happily over our foreheads.

I keep having fever dreams, sleep-deprived flashes of hell where it all goes to bits before my eyes. What if they had killed Christopher Robin or Winnie the Pooh outright? Committed murder because death is inevitable anyway for the fever dreams and fairy tales of our drunken hearts. So let them die in a haze of orange fluff and blue blood instead of letting the dark mass suck them away to the void where I now stood, perfectly still, on my two feet. His lips sucked gently at my cigarette, moving slow and unrepentant against the burn.

The girl is lean and her spine is as pliant and sinewy as wet bamboo. She threw her head back and laughed at something he said and I made the effort to imitate the same careless abandon in the swing of my eyes and arms as Pansy, Luna and I three rocked close in, like a castle pulling up the drawbridge. Months later, when I do get the courage to take Pansy aside and tell her, she laughs and says it happens to everyone and her jaw is set, her blue eyes fortified.

His hair was swept back from his face and he looked like a young Hitler in the dim light with a half-empty glass of beer in front of him and the blonde strumpet plastered to him. Her hair fanned down her neck and she smiled and smiled and took up the whole table with her admiration of him. The rest of us huddled in the opposite corner of the booth, watching her eyes roll back in her head with delight in his presence. We caught snippets of their conversation and traded them for some of ours.

A homeless man asked Draco for a dollar and I wordlessly rendered the crumpled bill into the man's outstretched palm.

_Once or twice that night she could have sworn he tested the waters of her lower back with his arms. They stood very close to each other in the bar, and she swooned against him in the after burn of a shot. His rosy breath percolated on her neck. She smiled through the sweat in her eyes and felt the phantom heat of his lips like a saint's blessing. She blinked up at him and suddenly the moment of consciousness and consequence was upon them both, a third party to their woozy gazing. To break the tension, she asked him for a cigarette and he grabbed her wrist roughly and led her outside. The sidewalk was iron beneath her high heels, and it was spinning. Draco gulped the cold air and whispered two words into Hermione's ear, then dropped her lighter into her outstretched palm and ambled back inside, casual and cruel. _

_Pansy was watching from the sidelines and she turned away and sighed. There was nothing for it. _


End file.
